The Prey blog

Straight from our labs

Aloha! We just pushed a new set of updates for the Control Panel that we think are worth mentioning. They won’t change your life but hopefully they will make it easier. Can you spot the difference between the previous version and what’s at the top?

Keep on reading for the answers.

One: Missing/not missing as it should

One of the biggest changes you’ll see is that when entering any device’s management page you’ll now see its status icon and information. This may sound a bit obvious, but the truth is that until now you needed to go back to the index page in order to read the device’s current status (more on this below). We also polished the UI elements a bit so we hope this will make device management smoother in general.

Two: Get a hold on what’s really happening

Until now, the list of devices showed two different status messages for each device: one with the OK/Missing status, and a second one with the Last seen/On-Demand status.

Not only did we merge those two status messages into one box, but we also made it much clearer — or so we hope so — as to what’s really going on with each of them. This means that you’ll see a different message depending on whether or not your device did check in at the moment it was expected to, or if it sent a report when it was supposed to, and so and so on.

This is what we’re talking about:

Three: Which is which?

As to spotting the differences, another common request we’ve received is to have an easier way of telling one device from another. This is specially important for accounts that have massive amount of devices — usually installed in batches –, because previously you needed to go one by one checking their hardware specs in order to make sure which was the one you were looking for.

If you see the image at the top, you’ll notice that the line below the device’s name will show whatever information the Panel has, so as to make it easier to identify a device. If the device’s model is known, it will show it, but if not, it will fall back to the device’s hardware specs, and if not, it will fall back to it’s OS name and version.

Four: No more mistakes

This is another small but big one. We reduced the importance of all “Delete this X” links on the Control Panel. We hope that now there will be less — hopefully none — accidental deletions of devices and/or accounts.

That’s about it. Next week we’ll have something new so stay tuned. Happy hunting!